Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  “At first I regretted defecting, very much. Everything was so alien to me. So I considered defecting again to a third country. I’m still here because if I go back to North Korea it will only mean death. Life has gotten better, but still there’s a lot of psychological stress in being a defector. South Koreans say they want reunification but they are distant toward me. I wonder how it would really work out.

  “South Korean officials have hardly made any use of my information. I met U.S. military intelligence people three times, but they just asked general questions. [On the other hand] I was writing a book and I discovered that my typist was taking pages of the manuscript back to the KCIA. I got rid of her and have refused to publish the book. I can’t publish it because some of my high government-official friends might be hurt, people who are outwardly loyal but who have some doubts. Exposing them to reprisal could damage prospects for reunification. Kim Jong-il is very upset. I imagine my family was sent to a harsh place. If Kim Jong-il had cause for even greater anger, I’m afraid he would get to my family in a worse way and even get to me. I thought Bill Clinton could bring reunification, since I believe the U.S. has power to influence the situation. But I have some fear that reunification would allow family members of defectors, and others in North Korea who have suffered on account of defectors, to come and kill the defectors.”

  I met Kim Jong-min several times in informal circumstances. As I got to know him I realized he was truly unhappy with the way his life had turned out. He spoke more than once of how much he missed his family. One daughter—like his mother—-was very beautiful; if she came to the South she could enter the pageant and become Miss Korea, he boasted. Once, he failed to show up for a morning appointment with me in a coffee shop. Later he explained that he had stayed up drinking with a friend and slept too late. I learned that he had married in the South, but then had divorced and was left with alimony problems. I worried that he was not making and never would make the adjustment to living in Seoul. And, as he had done, I extrapolated from his situation, worrying how North and South Koreans would fare living together in any eventual reunification.

  In July 2001, Kim left Seoul on a trip to China and promptly disappeared. By that time, it was not uncommon for defectors to travel to the China–North Korea border and mount rescue operations to try to bring out family members. Sometimes they employed Chinese who could travel freely in North Korea, but some of the defectors actually went in themselves— sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. At least one defector who went in himself-was captured and publicly executed. The Seoul newspaper JoongAng Ilbo in reporting Kim Jong-min’s disappearance the following February quoted colleagues as recalling his often expressed wish to bring his daughters to South Korea.1

  TWENTY-SIX

  Yen for the Motherland

  Hong Song-il, also known by his Japanese name, Seichi Tokuyama, might have seemed an anomaly. Forty years old “when I interviewed him,1 the third-generation Korean resident of Japan owned a chain of eight pachinko — Japanese pinball—parlors in and near Tokyo, drove a Mercedes-Benz and was both objectively and in his own mind a rich capitalist. Nevertheless, he contributed substantial funds both directly and indirectly to communist North Korea. In our talk he explained “why he and many other capitalistic Koreans looked north to Pyongyang rather than south to Seoul for their Korean homeland.

  Q: How do you and your family happen to be among the 700,000 Korean residents of Japan?

  A: “My grandfather came first. Around 1929 my father at age seven came over to join him, and ended up working as a day laborer in Osaka. After Japan surrendered in 1945, my family could go back and forth often to our home town on Cheju Island. But my grandfather supported the 1948 mutiny by Cheju people opposed to Rhee’s rule in South Korea. After Rhee’s government put down that uprising, the whole family—all my father’s brothers and sisters—came to Japan.”

  Q. Could they still go back and forth to South Korea?

  A. “No. The South Korean government prohibited entry by anyone affiliated with Chongryon, the pro–North Korean residents’ association in Japan. I think my father had joined that shortly after the single Korean group here split into pro-North and pro-South groups in 1945.”

  Q. Why did he take the pro-North side?

  A. “Before 1945, he opposed Japanese imperialism, which dominated and colonized Koreans. He came to Japan for economic reasons, to earn bread for his family. He believed socialism or communism would provide a better life for Koreans. He also realized the bitterness of statelessness under Japanese domination.”

  Q. It’s been many years since that time. Why do you and other second- and third-generation Korean residents support North Korea and Chongryon?

  A. “Upbringing has something to do with it, at least in my case. Not only did my father support the North, but I attended a North Korean school in Japan and so did my wife. In fact the cultural role of Chongryon is one of the reasons many in the younger generations continue to support it. It functions as a rallying or unifying agent in maintaining the Korean community and keeping up traditional culture. It even conducts weddings and funerals.”

  Q. Is that enough to persuade even a businessman such as yourself to support a pro-communist organization?

  A. “To survive in capitalist Japan you need some political support. The economic policy of the Japanese government is very hostile to Koreans. My business, pinballs, requires a license. The more successful my business becomes, the worse the police and political harassment becomes. Chongryon champions our rights. That’s the reason we support it. Kim Il-sung is something like a father figure for us.”

  Q. In Juzo Itami’s movie A Taxing Woman the female tax inspector goes after a pachinko-parlor operator. When you talk of official harassment, is tax one of the things you’re talking about?

  A. “There is overt and covert harassment.”

  Q. After all these years in Japan, have you thought of becoming naturalized?

  A. “After graduating from the North Korean school here, I did waver and think of becoming naturalized. But one day two young drunks kicked my car, and when I spoke to them about it we got into an argument. At first witnesses and the policeman who came to the scene were very cordial to me, blaming the two drunks and sympathizing with me as the victim. But after the policeman asked for my driver’s license and saw that I was Korean, his attitude changed abruptly and he blamed me for the incident and incited the witnesses to blame me as well, telling them I was Korean. He threatened not to let me go home until I confessed I had started the whole thing. When my wife and newborn baby came to get me out, I looked at my baby’s sleeping face and realized I must remain Korean. Although Koreans speak Japanese and live Japanese-style, we remain Koreans.”

  Q. Do you believe in the North’s communist system?

  A. “Frankly I don’t have much faith in communism. I think there needs to be a sort of Korean-style perestroika to reform it.”

  Q. Have you been to North Korea?

  A. “Yes, in 1982 and again in 1987, to visit an uncle and an aunt who had moved there from Japan. The uncle and his family live in the mountains of North Pyongan Province. The aunt lives in Wonsan.”

  Q. What did you think of what you saw?

  A. “I felt some contradiction between what I saw in North Korea and what I had been told. They have a party-first system. The Workers’ Party is everything. The basic requirements of living are met, yes, but there is little luxury in food, housing or amenities. Pyongyang has developed impressively but once you get outside the capital there is much to be desired. However, on the plane back to Japan I reflected that contradictions couldn’t be helped. In view of the military situation facing North Korea, its confrontation with the United States and the fact that it’s almost surrounded by major countries, its survival is at stake.”

  Q. What about the question of personal freedom?

  A. “What you call ‘freedoms’ in the capitalist countries cannot be found in North Korea, but they do enjoy sover
eignty and independence. Just look: There are no foreign troops in North Korea.”

  Q. How were living conditions at your uncle’s place?

  A. “Pretty bad by Japanese standards, although if you went there from certain Asian countries you would find better conditions than you had left at home.”

  Q. If your uncle moved there voluntarily, why was he put in such a remote corner of the country instead of being allowed to live somewhere with some urban comforts?

  A. “That kind of economic condition is just the same everywhere in the country.”

  Q. What sort of work do your relatives do?

  A. “My uncle is a mining engineer. His son drives a truck and his daughter is a clerk. Another of my uncle’s sons graduated from medical school in Pyongyang.”

  Q. One recent report by Asia Watch and another human rights group describes a North Korean class system in which people are ranked according to how well they can be trusted to support Kim Il-sung, with those opposed to the regime given the hardest living conditions. Does that jibe with what you saw?

  A. “I detected nothing that would suggest the presence of any opposition to the government. Wherever I went I saw no sign of opposition to or disaffection with Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. I did see differences in political treatment. Of course the best treated are Kim Il-sung’s family, then the anti-Japanese guerrilla fighters in World War II. Then come those who fought against the Americans in the Korean War.”

  Q. How were you received at your uncle’s place?

  A. “I got the most fervent welcome and warm hospitality—for the reason that I was a pro-Pyongyang Korean businessman who had donated money to the town. I’ve given hundreds of millions of yen to the pro-Pyongyang organization in Japan, mostly for Korean schools here as a sort of repayment of my obligation for what those schools did for me. The North Korean government started sending money to Korean schools in Japan right after the Korean War. I’ve given tens of millions of yen directly to the North Korean government in cash, trucks and heavy equipment. But still my donations are a joke compared “with those some businessmen have made.”

  Q. Will your family stay in Japan, or maybe try to go back to South Korea?

  A. “If Korea is reunified I’ll go back to South Korea. For the moment it’s politically impossible to go back. I’m telling my children, ‘Never think Japan is the only place where Koreans can live. You may go to Canada or the United States but still remain Korean.’ Japan is racially and politically intolerant. We think Canada or the United States is more tolerant and comfortable for Koreans. People of my parents’ generation are always talking of returning to the homeland. My generation’s main concern is how to live as Koreans wherever we live. Maybe in the fourth generation the attitude may change, I don’t know.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Winds of Temptation May Blow

  It was clear that something was going on in the spring of 1992, when North Korea’s Ministry of External Economic Relations sponsored a weeklong tour by more than one hundred business executives, scholars and officials. Most were from Japan and South Korea but small delegations came from China, Russia and the United States. The visitors would travel though remote areas that few Westerners had seen for decades. The unusual arrangements signaled unprecentedly serious efforts to attract foreign investment—and for good reason. Despite Kim Il-sung’s trumpeting of juche, national self-reliance, his country for four decades had gotten more than a little help from its socialist friends abroad. Now, the rest of the communist bloc had shrunken to China, Cuba and not much else, and that flow of aid and subsidized trade was squeezed off. A clear sign that Pyongyang’s external partnerships were falling apart had come in the summer of 1990, when South Korean President Roh Tae-woo’s “northern policy” of wooing the Soviet Union and Pyongyang’s other communist allies paid off spectacularly: Roh flew to San Francisco (I was the lone foreign reporter on his plane) for an epochal meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Diplomatic relations followed—and by late 1992, China, the last major communist holdout, would exchange ambassadors with Seoul.

  With 21 million people to keep reasonably satisfied, the regime had little alternative but to look to the global free-market economy. Belatedly following China’s example, Pyongyang had decided to set up its first free economic zones. The North Koreans welcomed the visitors from capitalist countries in the hope they would funnel investment into infrastructure and manufacturing. The goals were simple, explained Kim Song-sik, vice-chairman of the Committee for Promotion of External Economic Relations: “Introduce more modern factories of international standard, and generate more foreign exchange.” (I noticed that Kim Song-sik was wearing proletarian garb: Lenin cap, Mao jacket. But he set those off-with a modern accessory of more or less international standard, for which someone had expended foreign exchange: his belt buckle, which bore a Playboy bunny motif.)

  Besides the knowledge that they were being blamed for their countrymen’s plight, another factor had been helping to coax Pyongyang officials out of their shell. That was an international scheme for developing manufacturing, trade and shipping among countries facing the Sea of Japan, with help from the United Nations Development Program. Meetings in various cities in the region had explored multinational development of a triangular area of Russia, China and North Korea surrounding the mouth of the Tumen River, which formed the border among the three countries. Pyongyang’s turn to host a conference on the proposal was the occasion for our tour in North Korea.

  The tour provided a chance for North Korea to stage what one American called “a rolling party through the countryside” and play up its ambitious plans to expand tourism. Kim Do-jun, director of the Bureau of Tour Promotion, said around 100,000 foreign visitors were arriving annually, bringing in a total of about $100 million. Hong Kong, Thailand and Australia were being considered as the origins of new tourist flights. Pyongyang wanted to increase the visitor total to 500,000 foreigners, in addition to South Koreans and overseas Koreans. And Kim Do-jun spoke of long-range plans for such developments as “a Disney World” in Kangwon province, near the South Korean border in the mountainous eastern region. Clearly, though, there was a long way to go before the infrastructure would be up to handling such an influx. Counting those of us in the press, the delegation’s numbers were so great that hotels outside the capital couldn’t or wouldn’t house the group—so we had to bunk together for nights on end in the sweaty compartments of a slow-moving passenger train.

  The only delegates from the United States who had been invited for the 1992 affair were a pair of researchers at the East-West Center in Honolulu. I happened to be working at the center as journalist in residence (starting on a project that eventually turned into this book) and I applied to make the tour with them. I hoped that in the years since 1989 the Pyongyang authorities somehow would have removed my name from their list of unwelcome scribes—or, otherwise, that I would manage to go unrecognized as a blacklisted reporter thanks to my new scholarly affiliation. Perhaps, I hoped, there were separate bureacracies involved in screening scholars and journalists. After all, commentators on the top-down North Korean political system had noted that there was remarkably little in the way of lateral communication among parallel governmental units—apparently they needed to save their breath and paperwork for dealing vertically with their bosses and subordinates.

  Whatever the cause for my good fortune, I not only was accepted for the trip but received VI.P. treatment including a first class seat on the Air Koryo plane that took our delegation and others from Beijing to Pyongyang. When we arrived at the airport it turned out that a pair of young foreign affairs officials, assigned as handlers of the foreign reporters who were expected, did know who I was. “Have you really left Newsweek, Mr. Martin?” one of them asked. “Oh, yes,” I replied, truthfully. (I was happy that they did not ask whether I had left journalism. Would they have branded me an imposter and put me on the next plane back to Beijing if I had revealed, there at the airport, that I wou
ld return to full-time journalism after my fellowships ran out—and that I planned to pay for that trip by writing an article for a magazine?1)

  In the past, normally, it had been North Korean officials who restricted foreigners, while the foreigners demanded more freedom of movement—but early in this visit the tables were turned somewhat. Our Japanese tour organizers insisted that the accompanying foreign newsmen stay in the hall to cover the two-day Tumen conference. Then the two North Korean press handlers, officials in their twenties who were both named Kim, struck an unaccustomed blow for a free press. They heatedly argued the journalists’ case for skipping conference sessions to leave time for seeing more of Pyongyang. By that time the press corps had developed considerable affection for the two, to the point of giving them nicknames. A relatively tall and handsome Kim worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was dubbed Slick Kim because he always wore a well-tailored pinstriped suit. (It was the same suit day after day, I noticed eventually; probably he couldn’t afford a spare.) His shorter, slightly chubby colleague—-who resembled Kim Jong-il and other ruling-family Kims—-was called Fat Kim. Fat Kim, who worked for the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, told us that Slick Kim was on the fast track to eventual cabinet position.